Where to Find Serious Coffee in New York? Everywhere

Kaffe 1668's outpost in a Midtown lobby.CreditCreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times

By Oliver Strand

May 6, 2014

If you want to see just how much has changed in New York’s coffee scene in the last few years, stop by Gregorys Coffee.

The company, which has eight locations in Manhattan and three more on the way, has the familiar feel of a chain store: cheerful cashiers, enormous lattes, flavored syrups. But look carefully and you’ll also see a short menu of exceptional coffees from cult roasters, prepared to order on an AeroPress, a syringe-like brewer that produces coffee with unusual clarity.

Until recently, this was the kind of coffee and equipment you saw only at the hard-core coffee shops, the ones that felt like underground clubs: judgmental staff, coded language, obscure locations. Now you can find a drink like this meticulously prepared by friendly baristas in branded polo shirts.

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Brewing at Box Kite on St. Mark's Place.CreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times

You can also find it nearly anywhere, at prices comparable to the drinks at the bigger coffee chains. According to the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the city had 1,830 coffee shops as of March, adding 130 shops in the previous 12 months; the majority were single locations or part of a smaller chain. On average, one coffee shop opened in New York every three days.

It’s not just that the coffee scene is growing; it’s also growing up. In the years since New York first emerged as a serious coffee town, the zealotry behind the counter has softened, while the quality of what’s in the cup has improved. The nerdy shops are busier than ever — the ones that favor lighter roasts (which have more nuanced flavors), exclusively carry beans from the most recent harvest (which are fresher, and therefore taste better), and save their best coffees for the brew bar (where each cup is brewed individually with the focus of a monk raking a rock garden).

That the audience has grown is in no small part because of the changing geography of good coffee. Even former coffee deserts like Midtown and the financial district are flush with new shops.

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Cora Lambert, the owner of Box Kite on St. Mark's Place, and its 1 & 1, espresso and macchiato with a graham cracker.CreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times

“For a long time, our most sophisticated drinkers were at our downtown shops,” said Jonathan Rubinstein, who founded the coffee company Joe in 2003. “Now the Midtown crowd is coming around in a very vocal way. We never thought that bankers in ties would wait in line for drinks that are a culinary product, instead of an injection of caffeine.” Mr. Rubinstein, who already operates eight shops in New York, is currently negotiating lease terms for spaces in Columbus Circle, the financial district, Hudson Yards, Times Square and the World Trade Center.

It seems that real estate in those areas would be prohibitively expensive for serious coffee bars, the kind that offer brewed-to-order coffees and expertly pulled espressos — labor-intensive, low-margin businesses. In Midtown, a 420-square-foot retail space with no seating, essentially a to-go window, may cost more than $12,000 monthly in rent, and a 900-square-foot shop may run $30,000 a month.

Nor would those neighborhoods necessarily appeal to owners. “I was not looking at Midtown at all,” said Ken Nye, the founder of Ninth Street Espresso, which opened a location at the Lombardy Hotel on East 56th Street last year. “There are parts of New York that are off the radar, places you don’t want to be seen in because they’re not cool. Some are parts where the numbers don’t crunch. Midtown falls into both categories.”

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Elliot Rayman, right, an owner of Budin in Greenpoint; it stocks beans from the Norwegian coffee roaster Tim Wendelboe.CreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times

But by offering favorable lease terms and facilitating construction, developers have had success luring coffee bars into office buildings and hotels. The real estate developer Jamestown approached Kaffe 1668, which has two shops in TriBeCa, about opening a tiny coffee bar in the lobby of an office building at Fifth Avenue and 45th Street; Michael Phillips, Jamestown’s chief operating officer, said the company wanted a shop that would set the tone for the building. “Midtown is not so artisanal, or not thought of that way,” he said. “It was a great opportunity to shift the dialogue.” Now you can sit on one of the lobby’s sleek couches and sip a coffee brewed to order with beans from Finca la Felicidad, named for the farm in Guatemala where they are grown.

Traditionally, the batch brewer — the large coffee urn you would see in an office break room or at a church social — provides the muscle for a shop: It’s easy to dispense a drip coffee to go. But at shops like Little Collins, a small and fastidious coffee bar that opened in Midtown last year, most of the orders are either espresso drinks or pour-over coffee, both of which take time to prepare. According to Leon Unglik, an owner, some of the customers live in neighborhoods with good coffee shops and are familiar with this level of craft. But others are new converts or tourists who wandered over from Bloomingdale’s.

During the lunch rush, when a mostly corporate crowd floods the tiny room, the staff at Little Collins will turn out as many as 120 coffees in two hours. “The challenge is to get coffee out really quickly,” Mr. Unglik said. “People around here don’t like to wait for anything.”

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Counter Culture Coffee sources and roasts coffee, and runs regional training centers, like this one on Broome Street in NoLIta.CreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times

The growth is not confined to Midtown or the financial district. A number of small but influential roasters that made their names elsewhere are planting flags in New York. Blue Bottle Coffee, from San Francisco; Stumptown Coffee Roasters, from Portland, Ore.; and the Australian company Toby’s Estate have all opened multiple locations throughout the city in the last few years. Intelligentsia Coffee, the pioneering Chicago-based roaster, will open its second New York shop this summer, on Broadway close to Herald Square.

One of the most impressive facilities to open this past year was not a shop. Counter Culture Coffee, from Durham, N.C., turned a former carriage factory in NoLIta into a training center, a 3,600-square-foot loftlike space with stadium seating. If it were a coffee shop, it would arguably be the best equipped in the city. Instead, the room is used for lectures, demonstrations, classes and tastings. Some are Coffee 101: “Brewing Science” and “Milk Mechanics.” Others are more advanced. Last week, a lecture addressed the controversial centralization of the coffee trade in Nyeri, a county in Kenya.

The room may feel like an upscale jeans store, but it functions like a demonstration kitchen at a culinary institute. “It’s a space that the coffee community never had before,” said Jesse Kahn, the coordinator of the training center. “Making coffee requires the same focus and attention to detail you give to anything that’s comestible. It needs to be made with care and attention to be any good.”

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Gregory Zamfotis in one of his eight Gregorys, in Herald Square. It had three specialty single-origin options that day.CreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times

Serious coffee drinkers know that the question of who is roasting the coffee is as important as where the beans are from, and the New York scene is maturing in that respect, too. Many of the more celebrated local shops, including Abraço, Sweetleaf, Joe and Kaffe 1668, now roast their own beans, several of them at the Pulley Collective, an enormous roasting facility that opened last summer in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Roasting offers each outfit an enormous amount of control over the beans, not unlike a restaurant growing its own produce.

But New York also has its share of shops that select and stock notable roasters from across the country and all over the world. Joe Pro Shop, a cramped coffee bar geared toward professionals, is the most exuberant of the city’s multiroaster shops, as they are known, offering a selection of coffees that change every week. Recently, there were 18 in stock, including beans from revered roasters like the Barn in Berlin, George Howell Coffee of Acton, Mass., and Heart Coffee in Portland, Ore. These are the coffees that coffee geeks like. You could go to the Joe Pro Shop every week for a year to pick up one bag of coffee for yourself and one for a friend, and never buy the same beans twice.

A current of excitement surged through the city’s scene when Budin, a new shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, became the only place in the United States to regularly stock beans from Tim Wendelboe, a divisive roaster in Oslo. Some regard Mr. Wendelboe’s delicate, distinctive coffee as an undrinkable mistake, while others consider it to be among the greatest coffees you can find today. (René Redzepi, the chef of Noma in Copenhagen, is in the latter camp; last year, he designed a new coffee service around Mr. Wendelboe’s beans, staffing each shift with a dedicated barista who brews to order.)

Box Kite, a slim coffee bar that opened on St. Marks Place in January, is especially picky about the coffees it serves. “We try to find those unicorn coffees, the ones that sing,” said Cora Lambert, an owner. They change regularly — what you like one week may be gone the next — and so customers have to trust Ms. Lambert’s taste, and the person behind the bar to coax the most out of the coffees she chooses.

That expertise, and the willingness of customers to try unusual or even challenging coffees, is what powers this evolving and expanding scene. Over the next few months, there will be a crop of new shops, including a Café Grumpy at Grand Central Terminal that is opening on Saturday. It’s not the first independent coffee shop to be housed there, but its arrival is rich in symbolism. Café Grumpy, which already has five locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn, is taking over a space currently occupied by a coffee company that was once a small regional roaster: Starbucks.

The New York coffee scene is defined by its energy: new shops open, established players evolve and out-of-town heavies shake things up. The following coffees are an introduction to the city’s diversity. Taken together, they are a snapshot of what’s happening right now.

1. 1 & 1 at Box Kite

A barista’s order, the “one and one” is a double shot of espresso split into two drinks: a straight espresso and a macchiato. Usually shops don’t have it on the menu, but Box Kite showcases it, serving it on a tray with seltzer and a house-made graham cracker, to call attention to an espresso so dynamic it can both stand alone and be a good match for milk: 115 St. Marks Place, 212-574-8201, boxkitecafe.com.

2. Siphon coffee at Blue Bottle Coffee

The siphon bar at Blue Bottle’s Chelsea location is a homage to the coffee culture of Japan: take a seat, order coffee brewed on a siphon (a glass vessel stacked on a glass globe heated by a halogen burner) or on a nel drip (a thick cotton filter), then enjoy the spectacle. The coffee is rich and dense, the tableware elegant, the service regal — this is as close as coffee gets to fine dining: 450 West 15th Street, no telephone, bluebottlecoffee.com.

3. Tim Wendelboe coffee at Budin

The Nordic roasting scene is closely followed by coffee nerds: Some of the best coffees in the world come from that region. Budin is the unofficial New York outpost for those roasters, including Tim Wendelboe, a microroaster in Oslo whose coffees are so light and clean-tasting that they don’t really taste like coffee. For some, it’s too weird. For others, it’s a mind-bending experience: 114 Greenpoint Avenue (Franklin Street), Greenpoint, Brooklyn, 347-844-9639, budin-nyc.com.

4. Two shots of espresso at Everyman Espresso

Few shops offer more than one espresso — you need multiple grinders and customers interested enough to justify the trouble. Everyman Espresso in SoHo always has two espressos on the menu from Counter Culture Coffee: Rustico, a blend, and a single-origin espresso. Order both, and drink them side by side. Same roaster, same barista, same machine, but the flavors in each are as distinct as the whiskeys from different distilleries: 301 West Broadway (Canal Street), no telephone, everymanespresso.com.

5. Public tasting at the Counter Culture Coffee Training Center

Every Friday at 10 a.m., Counter Culture Coffee opens its training center to the public for a free tasting; here’s your chance to check out what is arguably the most tricked-out coffee setup in New York. The format changes every week. The focus may be on brewing techniques or espresso, and the instructors include hotshots like Katie Carguilo, the 2012 United States barista champion: 376 Broome Street (Mott Street), 212-213-4411, counterculturecoffee.com/training-centers/new-york.

6. AeroPress coffee at Gregorys Coffee

Gregorys Coffee looks and feels like a slick chain, but the menu includes a nod to the coffee geeks: a short selection of rare coffees from highly regarded if little-known roasters, brewed to order on an AeroPress, a brewer fetishized by coffee insiders. Available at all locations, although the AeroPress bar at the flagship just off Herald Square can be one click more focused than at the other shops: 874 Sixth Avenue (31st Street), 646-476-3838, gregoryscoffee.com.

7. Barista’s choice at Joe Pro Shop

Where the nerds are. This uncomfortable coffee bar is stocked with some of the most beautiful coffees in New York. Go by the official menu and Joe Pro has one of the most diverse selections of beans in the country; add to that the samples and one-offs sometimes brewed up behind the bar, and you’re tapping into a current of the obscure coffees insiders love. The best thing is to ask the barista what’s tasting good right now: 131 West 21st Street, 212-924-7400, joenewyork.com.

8. Brew bar coffee at Stumptown Coffee Roasters

The best-equipped brew bar in the city is in the back of the Stumptown on West Eighth Street: Here you will find all the toys, and an expert staff that always dresses for the occasion. Try one coffee prepared on three kinds of brewers, or three coffees prepared on one kind of brewer. This is where you go to ask the questions you’ve been afraid to ask. The shop opens early daily, but the brew bar is only open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.: 30 West Eighth Street, 347-414-7802, stumptowncoffee.com.

9. Espresso with milk at Ninth Street Espresso

Ninth Street Espresso opened in Alphabet City in 2001, the first in this new generation of coffee shops. The trip to Midtown, where a location recently opened, has been long and strange, but the shop still has some punk attitude: The drinks formerly known as macchiatos, cappuccinos and lattes are all now “espresso with milk,” a rejection of corporate coffee menus, and all cost $4. The drinks are the same at all locations, but it feels more subversive at the Midtown shop: 109 East 56th Street, 646-559-4793, ninthstreetespresso.com.